Woke wars at New York’s elite schools (fees $50,000)

There’s only one topic at the gates of the city’s most exclusive academies — parents in revolt
Riverdale Country School in the Bronx
Riverdale Country School in the Bronx
ALAMY

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One morning in September, Bion Bartning watched his two young children attend their first assembly of the new school year, which is to say that he watched them log into a Zoom meeting at home. His children were at Riverdale Country School where the fees are $54,000 (£39,000) a year. It lies in a prosperous corner of the Bronx on a leafy campus speckled with tennis courts and playing fields, a 20-minute bus ride from Manhattan. “It’s $60,000 with the bus,” Bartning says.

He expected to hear them recite the Pledge of Allegiance and sing America the Beautiful. Instead, the head of the junior school started talking “in the way that some adults talk to kids, talking in a babyish sort of way”, Bartning